Vöglein

I'm in the middle of an especially busy time right now, between work, my daughter's imminent graduation from middle school and the trip I'm taking later this week to visit my parents and try to make their house easier to navigate when my mother is discharged from her long-term care facility. That's why I've been delighted by the small detour that a dove's nest has necessitated.

Every year, doves seem to make nests around our house in locations that are vulnerable to wind, heat or predators. Obviously, there's no shortage of doves in the Sonoran Desert, so they must manage to propagate the species in these parts. But if the doves we've witnessed were in charge of the breeding program, I'd put even money on their disappearing from the scene.

At first I found the fate of our dove nests really hard to take. Over time, though, I became rather numb to the seemingly inevitable bad end to which they would come. That's why I didn't get my hopes up when I saw nesting activity in the hanging cactus by our front door a few weeks ago.

Mind you, the location -- shielded from midday and afternoon sun, inaccessible to terrestrial predators, benefiting from the insurance of being near a lot of human activity -- seemed better than the ones I'd noted in previous years. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure that something would reveal a hidden flaw in the doves' family planning. Then an egg hatched. And, instead of absentee parents, it was tended by extremely dutiful ones.

( See more about the nest in the cactus )